In a given day, many corporate accountants must cull through countless paper statements for a variety of billed telecom services such as VoIP telephone, cellular, pager, calling card, and even networking services, such as Centrex. Many corporations can minimize the administrative burden of reconciling so many statements each month by implementing a call accounting system.

Consolidated billing, which is sometimes referred to as convergent billing, combines telecom billing onto a single statement, for non PBX traffic such as those mentioned above. The ability to track telecom costs from multiple sources that are incurred throughout the entire network and to generate a single statement to bill back cost centers, departments, projects, or end users is often invaluable to corporations and allows for better cost analysis.

The tracking is made possible by call detail records (CDR) formats. Call detail records, both local and long distance, can be used for usage verification, billing reconciliation, network management and to monitor telephone usage to determine volume of phone usage, as well as abuse of your company's telephone system. CDR's are an asset in managing long distance telephone costs and aid in the planning for future telecommunications needs.

A good call accounting system will have a front end interpreter to easily accommodate the constant change of CDR formats from different vendors. The system should support formats from virtually any vendor/carrier, including ASCII, flat files, billing or CDR formats, etc. And for many systems, pre-existing definitions are available for popular AT&T, SBC, T-Mobile, BellSouth, Nextel, Verizon, MCI, Sprint, Qwest, and RBOC formats.

Choose a call accounting system that is designed to receive data from vendors' web sites, file transfers from carriers, or CD ROMs for importing into the database. This places all billing information in the same database, providing a consolidated engine whereby reports can be produced by employee and expenses charged back to the appropriate cost center, department, etc. as a recurring or non-recurring cost.